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How to Improve Your Retargeting Strategy This Year

13th August 2018

Retargeting is a marketing tactic used to convert visitors to your site who haven’t yet purchased from you. You can see which pages users are visiting to determine which products they were looking at and then show them a customised advert to try and get them back to buy.

Here we’re going to look at some of the top tips and tricks to help you deliver the best results from your retargeting campaigns.

Segmentation

At best, serving the same ad to any and all visitor is lazy. At worst, it’s wasteful of time, energy and money. Let’s say you sell clothes. If somebody is looking at swimwear, it is unlikely they’re going to be in the market for a new suit at this time. We want to get that user back to the website to finish buying their swimwear so we should be bringing them back to a product purchase landing page. We can also look at offering a discount code, which can tie in to our basket abandonment strategy.

Tease your users

We know they’ve been to the site, and we know what they’ve looked at. We also know they didn’t buy so we should be enticing them but indicating they are going to be missing out by not making the purchase. This is a fairly old school approach, but people are still weary of FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. The customer tease will let people know there’s only a few products left in stock, or you can let them know why thousands (if true) of customer are loving your services. A personal favourite is adding a countdown as it creates urgency – “save 10% before midnight” for example.

Cross Selling & Upselling

We don’t have to just use retargeting for people who didn’t buy, we can cross sell and upsell to people who have already purchased from us. You’ve just bought swimwear? You might need flip flops, or a sunhat and we can show we have those products too in our retargeting adverts. If however we tend to have one time purchasers, we will want to exclude existing customers from receiving retargeted messaging and we would exclude people have landed on the/order-confirmation or equivalent page.

Testing

As with any form of advertising, running tests and learning from them is crucial. If something isn’t working, turn it off. Unfortunately, not everything we do will turn to gold so sometimes we need to accept defeat and restrict the damage. It’s important to run variations and see which types of imagery, text and CTA’s are resonating best with our audience.

Use Multiple Channels

Our retargeting ads could be starting to follow our visitors around the Google Display Network, but we want them to be shown where our potential clients may actually be. Social media is a powerful tool where we can either show our ads in the newsfeed or on the right hand side bar (Facebook Only). Both Twitter and Facebook have strict creative guidelines so be sure to keep up with their requirement so not to fall foul of their rules.

Cart Abandonment

We did mention cart abandonment strategies above but this is worth its own point to drive home its importance. Someone has got to the very last stage before buying but something has stopped them, or dissuaded them from buying. We aren’t going to be certain what that is, but it could be the price or the delivery charges. Using an advert to retarget them here could give them a code for free delivery, or a chance to save 10% if they buy today. This is the same principles as teasing the customer, we want to give them a fear of missing out plus that little financial incentive to come back and buy from us.

The Soft Sell

We don’t always have to go for a hard sale when using retargeting. Sometimes customers just want to take some time to make a decision on whether they make a purchase or not, especially if it is a high value product. If you’re looking for a car to the value of £25,000 you aren’t necessarily going to make that decision today. Being offered £400 off if you sign today is probably going to put you off more than push you towards buying.

The soft sell is to remind the user how good your brand is, with more information about the car they’ve been researching to assist them in their buying process, rather than rushing them.

Using some of these tactics above will help you improve your return on investment when you are running your retargeting campaign. It’s important to remember to segment your audience, run tests and understand the timings when you’re going for the hard sell or the soft sell.

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